Queer left politics, pop culture and skepticism

About the author

Alex Gabriel is the author of Godlessness in Theory, a blog about religion and how to leave it, popular rhetoric and political dissent, secular, nerd and LGBT cultures, sexuality and gender or whatever else comes to mind. mralexgabriel@me.com; @AlexGabriel.

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There’s a passage from Marx’s critique of Hegel that antitheists like to quote and defenders of faith like to quotemine. In a piece titled ‘3 Myths That Make Navigating the Radical Left as a Person of Faith Difficult’, Kris Nelson notes Marx calls religion the heart of a heartless world as well as the opium of the people, claiming to ‘open up . . . the full quote, and not just the snapshot used to pick at those who dare let their god(s) lead them’.

The discontent of religion is at once an expression of and protestation against true discontent. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, heart of a heartless world and soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. To overthrow the bogus happiness they find in it is to demand they be allowed true happiness; to demand disillusionment with a condition built on delusion is to demand its end. And so to criticise religion is, in embryo, to criticise the vale of tears of which it is but an apparition.

Such critique has not shredded the imaginary flowers on people’s chains so as to leave them chained without solace or fantasy, but so that they might cast away their chains and gather real flowers. It disillusions people so that they might think, act and shape their own reality, as does anyone brought to their senses – so that their lives might revolve around them, people being their own true suns. Religion is no more than an illusory sun, revolving around people whose lives do not revolve around them.

The point missed on all sides isn’t that religion is either a bad habit or a source of hope – nor is Marx saying it’s one in spite of being the other. The meaning of ‘Opium des Volkes’, a metaphor Nietzsche and Bernard Shaw would later recycle, is that faith is comforting and delusional, easing the pain by clouding the senses: Marx labels it the courage of a heartless world as part of his attack.

There’s a lot I could say about those lines, which never fail to move me. Unlike new atheism’s figureheads, I’ve been a believer – I could say I remember not having enough to eat, going to church with a single mother and meeting other oppressed creatures; remember the cost of the church’s help, belief spinning out of control, abuse and mental illness taking hold; remember the bogus happiness, then finding poetry in the real world.

I could say that as an apostate on the left, my skepticism serves an instinct that, in Chomsky’s words, ‘the burden of proof for anyone with a position of power and authority lies on them’ – that my atheism will never be separate from the fight for a just society – and that my antitheism will never, ever be divorced from compassion for those on the margins. I could even accept, though I think his argument survives it, that there’s room to criticise Marx – either in that his presumption to dismantle strangers’ beliefs rings paternalistic, or inasmuch as leftists can and do repurpose God for their own ends.

For now though, Nelson’s post.

Calling oneself a person of faith feels like setting light fingers on ‘person of colour’ – a move less tasteful still when apostates whose former religions have a marked ethnic dimension are among the most stigmatised, frequently smeared as race traitors. Mentioning one’s spirituality – ‘We’ve all got one!’ – likewise resembles the language of sexuality. While it’s perfectly true certain religious groups are ostracised, constructing believers in general as an oppressed class is putrescent – if Nelson finds religion a fraught topic on the left, it’s because of its role as oppressor, and it’s hard to see how conflating the ‘struggle’ of Baptists and Anglicans with those of Jews and Muslims in the west does any good. [Read more…]

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Five days ago I posted I was in a crisis, asking readers of this blog to support it and to hire my skills. I meant to post an update on Thursday but came down with a cold, and am just regaining blogging faculties. (One thing about being a writer: a broken leg would be no problem whatsoever, but a common cold makes work impossible.)

Long story short, I’m now fine. Actually, I’m better than fine. [Read more…]

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Something I’ve come to love about this network is how it rallies round. Every so often when a FTBlogger has a personal crisis, they ask for colleagues and site readers’ help and get it in spades. I’m hoping the rule holds, because it’s my turn.

I’m in a serious financial crisis. Twice before, I’ve asked for assistance when things were dicey; at present, things are worse than dicey. [Read more…]

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A couple of days ago I asked for your advice about which U.S. nonprofit I should give Greta Christina’s money. I promised at the time to let you know which one I picked, and although she’s let the cat out of the bag, this is that post.

Plenty of excellent organisations were suggested, and I encourage all of you to read the thread – but the one that stuck out above all others was Black Skeptics Los Angeles. (They have a blog, if you weren’t aware, on this network.)

In my post requesting recommendations, I said I was particularly keen to hear about secular groups focused among other things on aiding lower-class communities, women, queer people and youth. BSLA works on all these issues: founder Sikivu Hutchinson has, in the last few years, been one of the most important voices calling for secular social engagement, writing in June about white atheism’s race and class problems, and via the Women’s Leadership Project has spearheaded ‘the only program for girls of colour in the Los Angeles Unified school district that explicitly addresses the relationship between organised religion, sexism, misogyny, homophobia and heterosexism’.

Donations to BSLA at the moment go toward its ‘First in the Family’ humanist scholarship fund, which in Greta’s words makes higher education possible for ‘South Los Angeles LAUSD students who are going to be the first in their immediate families to go to college, giving preference to students who are (or have been) in foster care, homeless, undocumented and/or LGBTQ’.

Remind me again how social justice warriors make atheists look bad?

Being able to support this work is a huge honour, and I’m proud to be doing so. May BSLA get all the recognition they deserve.

Recently grandmother, you tried to find out where I live. That I don’t want you to contact me should already be clear: in four years at university a bus ride from your home, despite repeated invitations, I never visited; when we’ve been together with relatives, I’ve avoided you; when you’ve tried to converse, I haven’t reciprocated. You’ve given me cash and I’ve donated it, sent me cheques and I’ve recycled them. It seems that you now want to send me more in spite of being told not to, and all the evidence I don’t want a relationship with you.

If you’re getting this message, it’s been relayed to you. Online, where what I write is published, thousands of people are reading it. None know who you are or anything about you, so nothing will come of this; I’ve hesitated to write it even so, but it’s obvious you’ll keep harassing me unless I go on public record telling you to stop.

You strike me as a bully, grandmother – snobby, controlling and contemptuous of everything apart from what you assume to hold status. You show particular contempt for foreigners and anyone ‘coloured’ or ‘nigger brown’ enough for you to deem them foreign, complaining ‘masses of Japanese’ (discernible, you insist, by their eyes) can be found in your nearest city, refusing continental food because of non-existent allergies; for ethnic Jews, warning me once that someone’s name was Goldstein, and for ‘gippos’ even though your mother was a Romany.

You show contempt for any woman not thin, youthful, white and femme enough – including, as it happens, most women I’m into – and for the children in your family born out of wedlock. As for the men I’m into, you call queer people ‘peculiar’. You show contempt for my whole generation and most born since the 1960s, describing us as ill-mannered, our clothing as scruffy and our English, since you’re not familiar with it, as meaningless. (As a graduate in literature, your mourning ‘the language of Shakespeare’ tells me you know little about him or it.) You show contempt for people claiming benefits, as your daughter and I did when she raised me, accusing them of ‘putting their hands out’ while you live off yours in old age.

Worst, you’re contemptuous of anyone who disagrees with you, laughing at, patronising or ignoring them. When you heard I wrote for a living, you commented I never seemed to say much; I don’t talk to you because I don’t waste words. You epitomise the figure of the senior bigot, obsessed with manners but oblivious to your own spite, and unlike some I’m not amused by it. Nor will I insult people your age, manyofwhom have inspired me, by putting your toxic outlook down to being 93.

Being the only one who won’t oblige you has made me a villain. Family members caught in what they see as the crossfire of two warring relatives have called me heartless for trying to indicate passively that I want you to leave me alone. This message might be heartless, but if so you’ve left me no other option, aggressively dismissing every signal I sent that I didn’t want to know you. The only reason others have been caught amid anything is that like a possessive ex, you’ve refused to let go.

This isn’t a warning or an ultimatum. I’ve quit Britain for central Europe and don’t expect to return while you’re alive. If I do you won’t get my address, and I’m now self-reliant enough to avoid staying with relatives at the same time as you. We won’t meet again, and I’m not interested in hearing from you.

If this is upsetting, you should have considered that people you insult, attack and treat with broad derision don’t have to accept it. If it’s only registering now that keeping a relationship with an adult might involve respecting them, too bad. You’ve had too many chances as it is.

It’s important to cry. When like me, you’re into men, that’s one of the first things you learn. Even at twelve, when not being straight first clicked, it never bothered me, but certainly it bothered other people, and the gay films teenage me streamed late at night always had similar endings, weeping heroes gaining acceptance. Versions of the scene are everywhere, from news reports of damp-eyed brideless grooms to awards speeches, soap storylines and prime drama. Liberal media, while still not keen on our other fluids, loves queer tears.

May saw more of these than its fair share. Within days of Conchita Wurst’s Eurovision win, the gay American footballer Michael Sam was signed by the St. Louis Rams. Footage of the moment he found out, which quickly spread online, could have been scripted to slow motion piano chords by Glee’s producers. Between Sam’s sobs and centre-stage lip lock with his partner, the clip supplied a perfect progressive moment. Straight athletes do of course cry regularly at good news – then again, their tears aren’t bundled in with social change the way his were or cast as overtures to ‘kiss[es] that made history’. If Sam’s weren’t definitively gay, that’s how they were framed.

If queer people have an image, we’ve been painted in a narrow colour palette, portraits of moist helplessness lining wall after wall; those of us who chose rage instead are nowhere to be seen. This isn’t about whether Sam was wrong to cry, or any individual choice – it’s about politics, power and which stories we tell. Fixating on the personal over the landscape of brutality beyond is part of the problem. The most tedious comments on the video, in fact, asked how the player had helped or set back equality by kissing his boyfriend, ‘flaunting’ their relationship or (God forbid) dating someone shorter than him.

Columnist Mark Joseph Stern argues that what the rights agenda needs is more queer PDA. It’s a clichéd but sound argument for homophobia’s survival that when we kiss in public, if we do, we glance round first. At the same time, same-sex lovers often are less lovey-dovey, and failing to kiss ostentatiously’s not always about fear. Putting partnerships on show – through dramatic proposals, wedding rituals, partner dances, rings – is one part of enforced monogamy whose victims have usually been straight couples, and since friendship tends to be within one’s gender, its boundary in gay relationships with eros can be blurred. I prefer them, as plenty do, partly because they don’t come loaded with coupledom’s affectations, and being told to kiss more visibly feels unwelcome.

But even arguing this is frustrating. Whether or not I ought to kiss my partners publicly is not the discussion we should hold – no more than what Michael Sam was doing by kissing his, or how his tears made history. Thinking on the same lines as Stern, Facebook users made gay kisses their profile photos, a move he called ‘a confrontational, in-your-face exhibition’. There’s nothing confrontational about giving mass media what it wants, in this case by feeding its fetish for what queer faces do. Liberals flinch when homophobes reduce gay men to anal sex or lesbians to vulvae, ignoring the vastness of what being queer means. Is reducing our politics to puckered lips and watery eyes any different?

Bulletins could have talked about the young men funnelled toward sport who aren’t white enough for U.S. classrooms or wealthy enough without sports scholarships for college; the adults whose lifelong security hinges on being hired to play. They could have talked about the culture of machismo policing entry to those sports (football especially) whose homophobia shuts doors for queer youth – how it’s small wonder it took a gay professional like Sam so long to break through it. They could have talked about that homophobia’s reach into school locker rooms around the world, or the violence gym classes direct at male bodies seen to lack butch prowess. Once again they chose portrait over landscape, zooming in on a single gay man’s tears to broadcast them without context.

Those of us who won’t weep on cue know context to be threatening. Reels of queer kissing and crying on TV, Facebook and HuffPost tell progressive straight people their acceptance is the solution – that if they well up like the faces on their screens, they’re doing their bit to rescue us. The bigger picture reveals a less comfortable tale, where media is not neutral, structural aggression exists and the same well-meaning straights are part of it – in their jobs, schools, families, churches and social institutions, as well as in their very thirst to rescue us via figures like Sam. One day, when celluloid sees fit to challenge them, perhaps that story will be told. The day it is will be the day they cry for us, and nothing else makes the airwaves.

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In January, I wrote an article at AlterNet advising secular groups on how to be less economically exclusive: how to remain accessible to hard-up nonbelievers, improve outreach and stop godlessness being a movement for the wealthy. The same week, Sanderson Jones – cofounder and newly appointed CEO of the Sunday Assembly – asked me to meet with him and offer the SA advice. I did, although he spoke (somewhat defensively) at least as much as he listened to me.

If I could stamp one practice out in atheism, unpaid internships would be it.

[These] positions are prestigious. They help enormously when seeking an activist career. Shutting people out who can’t work for nothing, or who might even lose welfare checks if they do, keeps atheism dominated by the rich. And labour has value. Not paying for it is theft.

You wouldn’t accept pay in “experience,” so don’t expect your interns to. And don’t just pay a stipend to subsist on. Pay the minimum wage where you are; if you possibly can, a living wage. If you can’t at present, fundraise. If you’re on a high-up’s pay, take a cut – that sounds like ethical leadership to me. If you really, really can’t afford paid interns, don’t take on unpaid ones. Better you don’t help anybody up the ladder than that you only help the rich.

You’d think a group that cared about this as much as Jones claimed the SA did would get the message – it was, after all, the message most stressed in the piece that made him contact me.

Today, he posted on the organisation’s site:

We are very pleased to announce the Sunday Assembly Community Building Summer Programme. We are offering 10 volunteer internships for a six week programme, to help people all over the world start their own Assemblies.

In short, we’re after fun and friendly people that want to get experience volunteering for a grassroots community organisation that’s changing the world. In return you’ll get a super fun environment, training in various aspects of the organisation, and the chance make a real difference to the expansion of Sunday Assembly globally.

Now, we can only offer lunch money (and lots of appreciation) for this, because we have very little money ourselves. However, what we do have is some amazing volunteers and, with their help, we are putting together 6 half day training sessions, so that you not only get experience building community but you also learn cutting edge grassroots and leadership skills from amazing people.

Purpose of the Community Organiser

You’ll be acting as guides to organisers of new assemblies that are setting up around the world. Community Organisers will help support new Assemblies to put together a local organising team and get things up and running, as well as being a friendly point of contact to help them troubleshoot problems as they arise.

By the end of your internship you will have helped create new communities across the world.

Projects May Include

Making contact with our organising teams and leaders from around the world

Being their ‘Guide’ through the process of starting up a new local Sunday Assembly

Making sure new Assemblies have all the documents and toolkits they need to get going

Responding to queries as and when they arise (during office hours)

Finding other potential organisers in the local areas you’re working with to help form a local organising team

Commitment

6 weeks (ideally full time) from the week commencing Tuesday 28th May (some flexibility on start date if still finishing exams etc).

Hours by agreement between 10-6pm Monday to Friday at our offices in Central London (near to Tottenham Court Road)

Support and Benefits

Expenses covered up to £20 a week

Weekly half day training workshops on different elements of our organisation from a sparkly array of speakers (see above)

The chance to make a real difference to the expansion of an exciting, young, international grassroots organisation

A glowing reference upon successful completion of the programme

The warm fuzzy feeling of knowing you’re helping to change the world for the better

What to do next

If you’re interested in coming on board for the summer, drop us a line ASAP and by Wed 21st May at the latest, at info@sundayassembly.com telling us the following (in 250 words or less) :-

why you think Sunday Assembly is great

why you are great

and finally how you think your greatness can make Sunday Assembly even more great

Please pop “I want to make Sunday Assembly even more great” in the subject line of your email so we can find your email quickly. We can’t wait to meet you.

According to Simon Clare, who recently left the Brighton SA over tensions with the London leadership, Jones ‘has already secured £50,000 worth of grants and donations, which will in part pay for his future wages.’ For your reference, six weeks of National Minimum Wage for ten interns working 40 hours a week – unless my Google’s maths is wrong – is £15,144. Even counting expenses payments as remuneration (rather than something extra), £20 weekly is fifty pence per hour.

These sound to me very much like employment-level positions, but in any case, filling them with full-time unpaid workers means no one can do them who can’t afford six weeks with no income in central London. If there’s one surefire way to make certain your organisation remains the preserve of the privileged for years to come, this is it. I’m skeptical of how much the SA really cares about this if they’re ignoring it – especially when it was one of the first things they heard from me.

Sanderson, colour me unimpressed.

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At my new address, the scientist – passive-aggressively polite – told me I had to sign a retroactive rental contract. This could easily have been done by email — when he asked to meet, I should have smelled a rat, but obliged outside a supermarket in November, not stopping to wonder why both ex-flatmates turned up. ‘While you were here,’ he said once papers were filled out, ‘you used BitTorrent?’

I had, I said, like almost all my friends. Filesharing was in my eyes like speeding on the motorway, an illegality most practised and few cared about. ‘We all do it’, the Barcelonian said, who seemed to have come reluctantly.

The scientist produced a further wad of fine-print forms. ‘We got sued’, he told me, ‘by the music industry.’

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Doubts costs nothing; voicing them can cost a lot. A piece I wrote for AlterNet last month, on the need for an economically inclusive secular scene, was well received. Readers from half a dozen groups said they’d implement ideas there, the Sunday Assembly asked my advice on reaching poorer congregants, and Conway Hall Ethical Society asked me to give a talk.

Conway Hall, beside boasting one of London’s most pleasant libraries, is the unspiritual home of British freethought; most major godless groups in the UK can be traced there, and the management is thought to be the world’s oldest surviving Ethical Society. Historically, it’s been a meeting spot for leftists, and the nineteenth century secularist movement it survives was frequently socialist itself. Harriet Law, one of its figureheads and the original Skepchick, was a farmer’s daughter and close colleague of Karl Marx; another, Edward Aveling, married his daughter and helped translate Das Kapital. Atheists nowadays think too little about class – there’s precedent.

My talk, ‘Godless and broke: making secular groups less middle class’, takes place on Sunday 23 March as a morning lecture, starting at 11am. To quote the blurb, ‘Secularists are broadening their image, but their cause remains seen, not totally unfairly, as middle class. We have to take action to reach hard up atheists and skeptics, or risk being a community for the well off.’ I’ll be discussing how.

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When I wrote on this blog that I was homeless once, response was good – including, to my surprise, from colleagues with affluent backgrounds. What’s not surprising is how many of my colleagues’ backgrounds were affluent. The secular movement is notoriously exclusive, and even internal moves for change have met resistance.

Demands we talk about class from those unwilling to adjust their politics have at times derailed gender and race (among other) debates, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t. A friend sought suggestions last week about how to be more economically inclusive. Here are the ones I made: